George Alec Effinger (January 10, 1947 – April 27, 2002) was an American science fiction author, born in Cleveland, Ohio.
His first wife, Diana, sometimes babysat for Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, a married couple who were both science fiction writers.
He achieved his greatest success with the trilogy of Marîd Audran novels set in a 22nd-century Middle East, with cybernetic implants and modules allowing individuals to change their personalities or bodies.
Those two chapters were reprinted in the anthology Budayeen Nights (2003) which has all of Effinger's short material from the Marîd Audran setting.
Each O. Niemand story is a pastiche in the voice of a different major American writer (Flannery O'Connor, Damon Runyon, Mark Twain, etc.
"Niemand" is from the German word for "nobody", and the initial O was intended by Effinger as a visual pun for Zero, and possibly also as a reference to the author O. Henry.
Other stories he wrote were the series of Maureen (Muffy) Birnbaum parodies, which placed a preppy into a variety of science fictional, fantasy, and horror scenarios.
He made brief forays into writing comic books in the early 1970s, mostly in Marvel Comics' science fiction, fantasy, and horror titles; and again in the late 1980s, including the first issue of a series of his own creation entitled Neil and Buzz in Space & Time, about two fictional astronauts who travel to the edge of the universe to find it contains nothing but an ocean planet with a replica of a small New Jersey town on its only island.